One of the SAHRC commissioners asked me a question I wasn't expecting: “do you teach food preservation? Isn't the reason people sell crops because they have excess?”

It was a good question. I realised afterwards they were really asking something deeper: how does a small farm make money when it's primarily growing to feed itself?

Growing for market and growing for subsistence are fundamentally different activities, but most agricultural policy has them the wrong way around. At least in my experience, the goal always seems to be income, despite the fact that often farm income can be very unpredictable and not always within farmers’ control.

When you grow for market first, you make your planting decisions based on what seems to sell at the highest price. If you think you have access to a middle-class market, you grow lettuce. It’s very perishable, high value and popular. A family can eat a lot of lettuce at home too, so it seems like a safe bet. But if that lettuce doesn't sell this week — because the weather was bad, or your contact at the market fell through, or the procurement officer changed — you have neither money nor staples. You used your limited garden space on a gamble, and you lost.

Zooming out, this approach is illustrated across Africa, where subsistence agriculture has been eroded by cash crops like coffee and chocolate, at the expense of traditional staple crops, often without comensurate long-term improvement in people’s daily lives.

Government procurement schemes often make this worse, not better. If a policy encourages you to grow cabbages, you plant a whole field of cabbages — because that's how you hit the target. The problem is that you've grown an enormous quantity all at once, which isn't actually what the procurement system needs, and which floods whatever local market exists. Again: you’re left with neither money nor food.

When you grow for subsistence first, you focus on meeting your family's needs across the whole year. You grow the nutritious staples suited to our climate, planted in succession so ideally, something is always ready. Growing without pesticides, herbicides or inorganic fertilizers is natural, because your planting is so diversified. You plan for 30–40% more than you need, because weather, pests, and the general chaos of farming will take their share. And then, when your systems are working and your soil is healthy and you know what you're doing, something cool happens: you consistently have extra.

That extra is not necessarily high-value or high-profit. It's beetroot, eggs, greens. But you sell it directly to your neighbours, who tell you what they'd love you to grow next season, and you begin to build a relationship with your customers. Even when you give excess away rather than selling it, you gain, because any improvement in your neighbourhood's wellbeing directly improves your own.

Subsistence-first farming actually produces better market access than market-first farming. Because subsistence requires consistent planting, it creates consistent supply. Because it's diversified, it smooths out the peaks and troughs that destroy monocrop income. Because it sells directly and locally, it captures two to three times the price per kilogram when compared to wholesale.

The challenge is that most smallholder agricultural policy frames the farmer as a market gardener first and a household provider second. It asks the question: what can you sell? when it should ask: what does your family need, and what will naturally flow from that abundance into your community?

When it comes to food preservation — yes, we do teach it. Well, kimchi making, cheesemaking, pesto making, drying, and tomato preservation at least. But if our planting is diverse and well-sequenced, then preservation is something we do occasionally, not desperately. The goal is to provide a variety of food almost year-round, not to grow one thing very well and hope the market is there.

Coming up:

18-19 April Our son Eli Emerson Adams (13) will be having the first exhibition of this year’s paintings, right here at the farm. It’s a great excuse to visit this weekend :)

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